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Topic: Vienna Lager water profile... (Read 6702 times)

It eludes me. The profiles I have seen seem very hard to reach using my brewing software. Anyone have a great Vienna Lager water profile they could share? I have come across some drastically different profiles for this beer, from Palmer to Vienna, to Ray Daniels. Never brewed this style, but I hear the actual profile is hard to reach as I have discovered. Adding this salt adds WAY too much of that etc. School me! Seems no matter what I add, nothing will add up.

My bet is Kai or Martin will have your answer but I'll take a shot at it.

Vienna - The water of this city is similar to Dortmund, but lacks the level of calcium to balance the carbonates, and lacks as well the sodium and chloride for flavor. Attempts to imitate Dortmund Export failed miserably until a percentage of toasted malt was added to balance the mash, and Vienna's famous red-amber lagers were born.

My bet is Kai or Martin will have your answer but I'll take a shot at it.

Vienna - The water of this city is similar to Dortmund, but lacks the level of calcium to balance the carbonates, and lacks as well the sodium and chloride for flavor. Attempts to imitate Dortmund Export failed miserably until a percentage of toasted malt was added to balance the mash, and Vienna's famous red-amber lagers were born.

Calcium Magnesium Bicarbonate SO4-2 Na+1 Cl-1(Ca+2) (Mg+2) (HCO3-1)

163 68 243 216 8 39

Taken from Palmer's book.

Yes, That's Palmers... Now try and hit that in the software! Or any of these for that matter. Maybe I am missing something big. In fact, I am sure I am missing something big.

Water adjustments are tricky. This isn't for you Lonnie but for others reading. The most important thing is to know what your base water is. If your using RO or Distilled that's easy, but if your using tap it can fluctuate depending on time of year. For my Vienna (and all my water adjustments) I focus on the style and not always the City it came from. By reading the BJCP guidelines we can start to see what you should be looking for in flavor. When you calc. your recipe you'll get an estimated SRM and that will help you determine mash PH. I only add Buffers and Acidity to my Mash and adjust the Chloride to Sulfates for my boil (that's just me). I have found that the simplest way for me to break down water adjustments is this; PH of your mash, and Chloride to Sulfates of your wort. Yes, Calcium and Mag. is important for yeast health and some flavors (calcium). so we should atleast try and have 50ppm calcium. I always shoot for a min of 75 ppm calcium. Here's my last and favorite Vienna adjustments. Calcium 106, Mag 22, Sodium 15, Chloride 41, Sulfates 77, CaCO3 153. the SRM of that particular Vienna was 15, and the IBUs where around 27 of Hallertauer. Hope this helps.

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"The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind."-Humphrey Bogart

Water adjustments are tricky. This isn't for you Lonnie but for others reading. The most important thing is to know what your base water is. If your using RO or Distilled that's easy, but if your using tap it can fluctuate depending on time of year. For my Vienna (and all my water adjustments) I focus on the style and not always the City it came from. By reading the BJCP guidelines we can start to see what you should be looking for in flavor. When you calc. your recipe you'll get an estimated SRM and that will help you determine mash PH. I only add Buffers and Acidity to my Mash and adjust the Chloride to Sulfates for my boil (that's just me). I have found that the simplest way for me to break down water adjustments is this; PH of your mash, and Chloride to Sulfates of your wort. Yes, Calcium and Mag. is important for yeast health and some flavors (calcium). so we should atleast try and have 50ppm calcium. I always shoot for a min of 75 ppm calcium. Here's my last and favorite Vienna adjustments. Calcium 106, Mag 22, Sodium 15, Chloride 41, Sulfates 77, CaCO3 153. the SRM of that particular Vienna was 15, and the IBUs where around 27 of Hallertauer. Hope this helps.

I'll give this a try in beer tools. I use only RO myself. For the love of gawd why don't someone simply make a stupid calculator that you input your volume (20 gal) and the profile you want to hit and kabam! Add 2 grams of that and 20 grams of this. I am so sick of playing this fill in the box thing and seeing what happens!

I would be curious to the grams of (whatever) you would add to 20 gals of RO water to reach these numbers. I would then input these into beer tools and pretend like I did it all myself!

The gist of it is that Vienna has been getting its water from various sources for quite a while now. One of these sources is snow melt from the Alps, which is lower alkalinity, and the other is local ground water, which has higher alkalinity. The problem is that even Herr Dreher, who started the Vienna Style, could have used the lower alkalinity water which comes from the Alps.

Lonnie, such a calculator is not a easy to write. But if you have Excel or OpenOffice you can solve an equation by minimizing the difference between the actual and desired water profile. It's not that hard to do, but a spread sheet has to be set up for that.

Although I think that this would be neat I haven't found the need for this since do only a few quick iterations on the salts and don't worry about hitting any profile that exactly.

Thanks Kai... I always figured it would be hard to do. But man wouldn't that be nice. I too have always just tried to hit things as best as I can. Seems like nothing will ever line up perfectly. Beer Tools has the cool little buttons that turn green when everything is dead on. I believe it is impossible to turn every single button green no matter what style you try, so I usually just go as close as I can. The Vienna is really giving me fits though. Things are wildly different in that calculator.

to hit some of the water profiles more closely you may need additional salts like magnesium chloride and/or magnesium carbonate since each of these salts will add an anion and a cation. I.e. you can't add calcium w/o also adding sulfate, chloride or carbonate/bicarbonate.

I sure hate to see the propagation of misinformation and this is another example. The Vienna profile published by Palmer is not even in the ball park! The profile published by Daniels is not too bad with a caveat.

The water source for Vienna is the same today as it was about the time that Dreher created the Vienna style. It is debatable if he used the new water source from the Alps or if he used the previous source. The previous source was groundwater drawn from sand and gravel aquifers along the Danube River.

The water quality today is exactly as it was when the aqueduct from the Alps was constructed. The City did not perform any water treatment back then and they still don't. That profile (taken directly from the City's website) is:

Ca 75 ppmMg 15 ppmNa 10 ppmSO4 60 ppmCl 15 ppmHCO3 225 ppm

As those of you who know water recognize, this is an alkaline water with high temporary hardness. It would work for dark beers (RA = 124), but would not produce the fine amber Vienna style. Many of you also know that one of the earliest water treatment methods available to brewers of yore was boiling to decarbonate the water and drop the temporary hardness. The boiled water profile can be estimated fairly accurately. The boiled profile is as follows:

Ca 27 ppmMg 15 ppmNa 10 ppmSO4 60 ppmCl 15 ppmHCO3 80 ppm

The boiled profile now has a RA of about 45, which is pretty good for amber beers. As you can see, the boiled profile does agree with the information presented by Daniels (yeah Ray!).

I wouldn't worry too much about duplicating any water profile quoted for any location since water quality varies naturally and being within about 10 ppm of any of those ion concentrations is probably not going to be noticeable.

There you go! Brew your next Vienna with the boiled Vienna profile to produce great beer.

I did a Vienna last year, and there were many profiles and opinions on the water. None were conclusive. Martin's post above really makes it more clear what I should do next time. Thanks Lonnie, for starting a good thread.

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Jeff RankertAnn Arbor Brewers Guild, AHA Member, BJCP CertifiedHome-brewing, not just a hobby, it is a lifestyle!

Thanks all for the info! Martin, the boiled Vienna profile was relatively easy to hit using RO water in my profile. Never actually trying to hit a specific city water, I always just try to do what is good for the beer. This makes since, but this dang Vienna was a fit! The only one that I was able to even get close on was the Daniels profile. As Kai said, without more specialized salts that I can't easily get at my LHBS, I was able to hit this one much closer with my normal stock of stuff.

Martin,How did you calculate the post boiled numbers for the Vienna water? This has been a hot topic of converstation with our LHBC in Lincoln, Ne., recently. We are considering preboiling some water off and sending it to ward labs, but if there is an easy (easy being a relative term ) way to calculate this I would love to know. Thanks. And I agree with the topic about Vienna. Daniels and Fix's info seems to agree and I have been diluting my water with R/O water when I brew my vienna and the vienna flavor is fantastic!